


every ending is arbitrary.

by misandrywitch



Category: BioShock Infinite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 19:53:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3908548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fate is a red-haired man in a pale suit. Fate is a door that stays locked, and a lighthouse, and a city. Elizabeth can see all the possible endings and none of them are happy. Elizabeth knows what has to happen. Elizabeth knows what she has to do. She knows what she has to ask Booker to do.<br/>(The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire. Or: Elizabeth meets her mother.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	every ending is arbitrary.

**Author's Note:**

> abigail dewitt was developed by me & kate romnovae, and she's the best character that never appears in bioshock infinite. i have a lot of ideas about how elizabeth learns everything that she does towards the end of the game, and how she takes a moment to find out about the one person booker doesn't answer any questions about.
> 
> title comes from 'the robber bride' by margaret atwood
> 
> shittybknights.tumblr.com

When it happens, when the blinders fall off and all the doors fling open, Elizabeth isn’t even surprised. She feels a rush of panic, just for a second, and then that’s gone and swallowed, brushes away by the magnitude of what she knows, what she is, what she sees.

She knows what happened, now. She knows what she needs to do.

The revelation of the truth settles over Elizabeth like it was always there because in a way it was. It was always going to end up this way. It already has. The things they’ve done, she and Booker, they felt like choices at the time and they vary a little, wavering in and out of focus like subtle variations on a theme, but they all point towards the same destination. Not all of them reach it, but they all lead here.

Elizabeth sees it play out, as it has, as it will, over and over again, the same loop and all of them running through it with a determination that belays futility. All of them, a cast of characters in someone’s infinite drama, passing through different scenes but never getting any further than the apex before it all begins again. All of them: Booker and the prophet. Daisy Fitzroy Lady Comstock and Slate and Fink and all the rest. Rosalind and Robert; heads, tails, alive, dead, Comstock’s enablers and his victims. Infinite.

She sees herself,

She sees herself, wide-eyed and running, ask for answers and Booker’s voice; “You’re the girl who’s getting out of this tower!”  

(She wants to reach through and catch him and say “I am more than that and it isn’t my fault, it’s been done to me, I’ve been made into this and you should know that, you should fear it.” She also knows he wouldn’t care.)

She sees herself, old, broken, reaching back through time and folding dimensions to pass on a note, a message to a world that died when her hopes did.

She sees herself killing Daisy, and she sees herself making a different choice and dying instead, and she sees herself never even reaching that moment, and they are all her, all of them.

 

 

 

 

It’s hard to keep them all straight, all these women she might have been. All these women she is. Some of them are young, some of them lost, some of them dead. Some are worse than dead; they’re terrifying, she’s terrifying. She’s destruction and an army of unstoppable fear and fire from the heavens. She has to watch for a while to understand the pattern, why she becomes this, when she breaks. When she notices it, it’s obvious; it’s Booker. Booker arriving too late, or not at all.

She is all of them at once but at the same time, she is none of them. She’s outside of all of it. She sees all of it.

Elizabeth travels through doors and doors and worlds and worlds, and she watches her own story, her own life, and she thinks about Booker. 

 

 

 

 

“I know what I have to do,” Elizabeth says. “I have to be sure none of this ever happens.” They nod together. “None of it. This whole world. Columbia, Comstock. It won’t exist.”

“Subjective,” says Robert.

“But I wish I didn’t have to,” Elizabeth says. “He's dead, isn't he? Isn't that enough? Why can't it be enough?"

"Alive and dead are just two sides of the same coin," Robert says. "We would know." 

"Isn’t there another way?”

“Afraid not,” Rosalind says, and her voice sounds almost sad. “We’ve tried everything.”

“We’ve been at this a long time,” Robert says.

They look at each other, the three of them. Elizabeth sighs. There is light behind them, and noise, unfamiliar music. She’s travelled without really meaning to.

"I'm tired," she says, because she is. 

Robert looks sympathetic. Rosalind looks annoyed. 

“Where are we?”

“Why are you asking where,” Rosalind says, “when the truly delicious question is when?”

“Should I go find out?”

They smile and Elizabeth turns towards the light. She pauses and looks back. They’re standing arm in arm watching her.

“I understand how you’ve done it,” Elizabeth says. “But I don’t know if I understand why.”

“That answer,” Rosalind says, “should be obvious.” Arm in arm they turn and they’re gone, almost like they were never there at all.

 

 

 

Elizabeth steps through the tear and she knows where she is. She did it by accident but it was still intentional; it isn't enough to stand outside of it, to walk around it, to see the story unfolding like she's reading it in one of the books she read over and over as she grew up, so thoroughly that she knew the words by heart. She's in it, in the story, and she took herself here. To find something. To see it for herself. She isn't sure what yet. 

 

 

 

 

She’s never been anywhere quite like this before. This is New York City, this is loud bright music and women smoking cigarettes and men in dusty boots playing pool. It isn’t Paris but it’s beautiful in a way, loud and dark and smoky. Nowhere in Columbia ever felt like this. Columbia had secrets, but not like this city, this country has them. It feels heavy and old and scary and wise and new and wild, rooted in the earth, rooted in the history of all the people who’ve walked here before. Columbia airborne, doesn’t have that.  She’s never felt anything like it. 

Elizabeth steps through the room, maneuvers around a few men with pool cues, soaking in the atmosphere, reveling in it. She doesn’t know how she got here, really, or if this is even real or if that even matters. Reality is pretty subjective to her, now. It’s all real. None of it is.

Outside one of the thick glass windows she can see dark buildings against a dark sky, and lights, and people laughing in the street. She’s so intent at looking out through the glass that she doesn’t move out of the way when someone walks into her, a tall man with a thick dark mustache and a round-topped hat.

“Pardon me—“ she says, and he rolls his eyes, face in an ugly sneer.

“Lady like you shouldn’t be alone in a place like this,” he says. “Best get out of the way now. Get on home.”

“I’m sorry—“ Elizabeth starts to say but the man is already moving on, and suddenly she’s nervous. She’s so many things but she’s also just a girl and she’s alone in a place she’s never been before and she’s not entirely sure how she got here, isn’t really sure how to get back. She steps away from the window quickly, feeling nervous, feeling vulnerable and a little weak in the knees. The bar, lined with high stools, is to her left and she steps over to it and sits down on one of them, the wood of the bar counter smooth and worn under her fingers. The bartender asks her if she wants something, raising an eyebrow.

“Water?” Elizabeth asks, and he sighs but fills her a glass.

The glass doesn’t shimmer, doesn’t fall through her hands, and she knows she is really here, in New York. She’s gone through a tear, and to get back she just has to open it again. She’s done it before. This calms her down enough that she glances around the room again, listening to the music, looking at the faces of the people surrounding her. She finds she knows the man seated next to her at the bar.

 

 

 

 

Booker is younger. The Booker she knows—knew-- is ageless in a way she’s only now really understanding, but not in a way that hid or obscured it. He looked old, drawn, worn thin and made hard, stretched and dried like leather in the sun, over and over and over again. He looked like a man who had pushed back against his whole life and fell down hard, a lot. Over and over. Elizabeth doesn’t even know how long. All she knows is that he never stayed down. Not for long.

Booker—this Booker, the one sitting at a greasy bar counter in New York at the turn of the century, is probably no older than she is. He was sixteen when he went into the army, she knows. He might be—what—eighteen? Nineteen? But he doesn’t look young. Just younger in comparison. Elizabeth doesn’t know if Booker ever really looked young. His face is clean-shaven and slimmer, fewer scars, and his hair combed to one side in a way that’s almost tidy. There’s less tightness around his jaw, less weight on his shoulders. 

But his eyes are dark and deep and old and tired, and his hands, holding a glass on the countertop, don’t stay still.

 

 

 

 

He was sixteen when he went to South Dakota, her father. He’s her father. She’s just learning this. She always knew this. Sixteen and too brown and already good with a gun. In one lifetime, when he doesn’t run, when he lets himself get pushed under the water and asks for absolution, he leaves a part of himself behind, the part that regrets. River water floods into his lungs and pushes something out, to make room for the divine, for the prophet.

Booker—her Booker—doesn’t leave any of it behind. He carries it with him wherever he goes. 

Elizabeth follows him away from the river and Elizabeth follows him into the army and Elizabeth watches him sit by himself at the bar and wishes she had something to say to him.

 

 

 

 

She never gets there. She never does because a woman walks up to the bar and says Booker’s name and he turns towards her, passing Elizabeth as he goes, and something in his face catches light and it’s sad and magical. The woman is dead. She’s been dead for almost two decades (for centuries, since yesterday, she’ll die tomorrow).

 

 

 

 

Elizabeth didn’t know anything about death, before she met Booker. The first time she’d watched Booker kill those people, the Columbia soldiers coming after them, she’d been sick to her stomach and back again and then she’d been angry because she hadn’t wanted to admit she was scared. After that, she tried to stop thinking about it and sometimes she was able to but she still remembers how small Daisy Fitzroy had looked when she’d fallen away and hit the wooden slats at Elizabeth’s feet.

This woman is dead but she isn’t because she’s walking through the people in the room and smiling  a slow and clever smile that’s so alive and real and bright.

“Booker Dewitt,” the woman says. She smiles brighter, stops walking and pauses with one hand on her hip. She has dark hair falling over one shoulder. “Should have known I’d find you in here drinking alone.”

“Abigail Gold,” Booker says slowly, shaking his head, turning so his elbows are propped up on the counter behind him. “Didn’t think I’d see you here.”

She laughs, and her laugh is bright and loud. “That’s because you’re always looking in the wrong direction, Mister Dewitt,” she says. Abigail, Elizabeth thinks. Abigail. “Walking around with your eyes closed.”

“Cause there’s nothing good to look at.”

“You sure about that, Mister Dewitt?”

“Might change my mind, Miss Gold,” Booker is still seated and he looks up at her and he almost smiles. The set of his mouth is warm and the set of his shoulders is gentle. “If you come a step or two closer.” She does, and Elizabeth gets a long, clear look at her mother.

Elizabeth sees the similarities in their faces right away. Dark hair, slender wrists, eyes as blue as summer skies in Kansas in July. As bright as the space between worlds. She’s wearing yellow, and has a fair, heart-shaped face and a distinct nose and long lashes. Abigail, Elizabeth thinks. Abigail. She can’t tear her eyes away from her, finds herself drinking in every detail of her face, the way she bites her lip and laughs when Booker turns to the bartender and orders her a drink. She’s no taller than Elizabeth is. She’s been dead for two decades.

“A gin for the lady,” the bartender says, and Abigail takes the glass and sips it and smiles.

“I thought you promised you’d come by and see me when you got back into the city,” she says. Booker makes a little face, a crumpling of his forehead.

“Your father don’t want me coming anywhere near your home and you know it,” he says.

“What my father doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Abigail looks at him through her lashes and he shakes his head. "And what's he afraid of?"

"He thinks I'm bad news. He ain't wrong, you know."

"You are bad news, Mister Dewitt," Abigail smiles. "That's why I like you. My father thinks I'm a little girl who can't take of herself--"

"You can take care of yourself better than anyone I ever did meet," Booker says. His tone is light. Flirtatious? It's surreal. 

"That's right," Abigail smiles and shakes her head so her hair slides off her shoulder. It reaches the small of her back, thick and heavy like ink. "I think he's worried you're gonna eat me up." 

“It’ll be on my hide, you know, if I do.”

“But I might like it," 

“You say that enough and maybe I’ll believe you.” 

“Just trust me,” Abigail says, and Elizabeth knows that he does. Elizabeth knows other things too, because she can see them. Abigail was never scared of anything; she broke her arm falling out of a tree when she was ten because she climbed too high, and her dad had shook his head when the doctor was done setting it and laughed when she said she wasn’t afraid.  Booker was always afraid, of himself. He didn’t want to hurt her. She didn’t care. She’d kissed him first, on a bridge in a park on a very dark night in the summer, and he’d never wanted to kiss anyone else after that. Never did.  

 "My drink is empty, Mister Dewitt, what are you going to do about that?" Abigail says, holding up her glass. Booker takes it from between her fingers, gently.

"Order you another one?" 

"I was thinking you might ask me to dance." 

"Abby, you know I'm a terrible dancer." 

"I don't care." 

"You grew up with those high society boys, I'll make a fool of myself." 

"I don't care," she says again, firmly and sweetly. 

"Well, alright," Booker says, and gets to his feet, leaving both glasses on the bar counter behind him. He takes her hand (his fingers look rough and beat-up against hers but her grip is steady and certain) and they walk away from the bar and towards the center of the room. Booker puts his hand on Abigail's waist gently, like he might break her, but she steps in closer and slides her own left hand up his arm, tossing her hair back, smiling up at him. Music is still playing in the room and they move to it, Booker clumsily and Abigail deftly. He frowns down at his feet and she smiles sideways at him as he concentrates and they look good together, arms around each other, turning slowly as the music gets slow. Something in Elizabeth's chest catches, feels heavy and stuck and strange as she watches them. 

"I'm stepping on your feet," Booker says sheepishly, and Abigail laughs and says she doesn't mind. 

 

 

 

 

It’s almost like she’s seeing herself outside of herself, all these women she is, all the possible choices, the possible lives she leads and names she goes by. Constants and variables. They all start here, with these two people, Abigail’s hand on the crook of Booker’s arm.

 

 

 

 

There’s always a girl, a lighthouse, a city. The rest is just details. They splinter off, spiderwebbing away from every choice, and she can feel all of them. Her life, her lives, every iteration in millions and millions of worlds, lighthouses in an endless sea that she leads him to every time, over and over. Elizabeth is the nexus, the center of every fractal seeing it move all around her, everything she’s ever known or might know.

But it starts at ten. Booker and his brothers helped their mother bury their father behind the house. She prayed to God. There wasn’t a response. He learned to stop listening for them.

It starts a few years after that, in a village on fire, when Booker, with blood in his hair and dirt under his nails and something getting sick deep in his soul, turned from the bodies and let them burn. It starts when he ran from the circle of men and women in the clear cold stream back to New York and it starts when he handed over his child to a red-haired man in a pale suit (Anna. Her name was Anna. _Her_ name is Anna. She doesn’t even feel betrayed by this because it’s already happened, it’s happening now, and it’ll happen again if she doesn’t stop it). 

And it starts here. Her parents, arm in arm in a dark room, Booker tripping over his feet a little and Abigail laughing, laughing because she loves him and laughing because she doesn’t mind.

 

 

 

 

When Abigail smiles, her whole face lights up and it travels from her mouth to her eyes to her eyebrows. It seems to bleed into him a little. When he smiles, he looks his age. 

Elizabeth knows how this is going to end. Elizabeth knows Abigail dies, a year or so from now. She sees that, too, her mother’s face looking thin and tired and how she couldn’t get out of bed some days because she was so sick and the way her father, Elizabeth’s grandfather, had cried when he’d buried her. Elizabeth knows Booker wants to marry her but he can never scrape together the money even when he’s working himself to the bone. Elizabeth knows that Booker is left with a child he doesn’t know how to care for, that he sells her away as a solution to his problems and that afterwards he almost drinks himself to death for real. She knows because she can see it happening.

 

 

 

 

Fate is a red-haired man in a pale suit. Fate is a door that stays locked, and a lighthouse, and a city. Elizabeth can see all the possible endings and none of them are happy. Elizabeth knows what has to happen. Elizabeth knows what she has to do. She knows what she has to ask Booker to do. 

She’s scared, for a moment. She’s just a girl after all.

And then she looks back at the faces of her parents, dancing together in the smoky bar and she knows they are happy. They won’t be later, but right now they are. They love each other. It’s one moment and it’ll be gone faster than either of them can believe.

(And yet it won’t, because here it is. Not gone for good.)

Elizabeth watches them for a minute longer. Then she gets up, and she takes a very deep breath, and she heads back to Booker, and to Columbia, and to what she has to ask him to do.


End file.
